Research spending by the federal government is usually associated with organizations such as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. But the budget for the Department of Defense is enormous and contains a significant research component. That money goes to fund a broad range of fields, including basic biomedical research on a number of cancers. The DoD has just announced the results of an annual funding program targeted at getting what could be termed "dual use" equipment in the hands of university researchers.
The funding program has been in operation for several years and is "designed to improve the capabilities of US institutions of higher education to conduct research and to educate scientists and engineers in areas important to national defense by providing funds for the acquisition of research equipment." Although the program only funds $41 million worth of projects annually, the equipment they're targeting is pretty high-end: the grants cover anything between $50,000 and $1 million. Getting that sort of equipment, at least through the NIH or NSF, is essentially impossible without organizing a collaborative application by a number of independent research groups.
Although the DoD clearly prefers that their money go to enhance ongoing defense research, the proposals could be justified by "the likelihood of the equipment to establish new research capabilities or to enhance current research capabilities that are relevant to DoD areas of research interest." The emphasis on educating future scientists and engineers, combined with the broad interests of the DoD, suggest that the grants could fund any number of academic research programs.
That suggestion is borne out by the list of grant recipients. Picking five grant winners at semi-random (I focused on research that I was likely to comprehend) revealed all were involved in basic academic research involving topics such as lasers, DNA repair, and electron microscopy. Several grants went towards general-purpose computing clusters.
Although the days of industry supported "blue sky" research may be over, programs such as this suggest that "Pentagon Socialism" may not have died out completely with the Cold War. The total funding in this program is small, but it provides researchers with equipment that's useful for general research and education and difficult to obtain via other sources of funding. Programs such as this may play an increasingly important role in keeping open-ended research programs running in an era when nondefense government research programs face stagnant or shrinking budgets.